With nearly a third of the country having already received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine and more than 2 million vaccinations occurring every day, the cloud of anxiety that has plagued the nation for the past year is finally beginning to lift. The end of the pandemic is in sight. Attaining herd immunity—the point at which transmission stops because the virus doesn’t have enough susceptible hosts to infect—now feels like a real possibility. But there’s a catch: The children must be vaccinated.
With kids making up about 22 percent of the population in the United States, their immunity is crucial to reaching a national threshold of immunity, which experts estimate to range from 70 up to 90 percent, explains Tara C. Smith, an epidemiologist at Kent State University in Ohio.
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April 2, 2021
